With most of Bell & Telus upgraded, Canadian cable broadband homes almost go negative. Glen Campbell of Merrill Lynch pointed me to CRTC data http://bit.ly/1voSz5q that showed the Canadian telcos beating the cablecos, who lost 1.3% of the market in 2013. In the U.S., the results were the opposite, with cable picking up a point or two of market share. Telcos are beating cable in Canada, Britain and France. Cable is beating telcos in Germany and the U.S..

The largest single factor is the % of homes upgraded by the telco. A strong majority have been upgraded in Britain and Canada, but fewer in the U.S. In Germany, cable is competing by offering twice the speed at the same price, easy because DT is only now getting serious about upgrading. Mike Fries and Liberty Global/Unitymedia KabelBW prefer to raise prices than to increase market share, so we'll see how that plays out.

The U.S. telco figures are skewed by the AT&T/Verizon decision to kill all landlines to the majority of their territory, going wireless only to 20-30% of homes. They are treating those homes like the Romans treated the Sabine women so of course many are fleeing to cable. Where they have FiOS and U-Verse, they are doing fine, but in the other territories AT&T is doing so poorly they lost a net 50,000 lines in Q2.

Below, the U.S. data for 2013 and for Q2 2014 from Leichtman Research. Comcast is a continuing standout, Cablevision a laggard (-9,000 in Q2.) AT&T and Windstream are hurting. Frontier is holding its own, partly through marketing and partly through upgrading the territories that Verizon had been "harvesting" before the sale. They recently told Wall Street that will be hard to maintain.